Word of the Day – “peinlich”

and welcome to our German word of the Day. This time, we will talk about … my pee stain. I was in a café, a very crowded café I should say, and I had to go to the bathroom. And as the guys among you know… sometimes a few drops come out late, no matter how thorough you are. That’s what happened to me that day. And as I washing my hands (like real gentlemen do), it formed. A pee stain. Roughly the shape of Australia. Eight inches in diame… okay, okay, I’ll stop. Of course, we’re not gonna talk about that pee stain. There never was such a pee stain to begin with. The reason I made it up is that it has a lot to do with the word we’ll look at today:

And peinlich does have a lot to do with pee stains because peinlichmeans embarrassing. Why it means that, and why the translation is not always straight forward, that’s what we’ll look at today. So let’s jump right in…

The origin of peinlich is the Latin word pena. The original sense of that was about punishment, retribution. A sense that we can still see in the word penalty. But because things were generally a bit rougher back then, it is no wonder that pena broadened to include the ideas torment, suffering and eventually made its way into several European languages as the general word for pain. The German tribes liked their own word for pain better: der Schmerz. And I kind of get it. I mean… Schmerz does sound like someone twisting the skin on your arm.

But German does have an offspring of the Latin pena,as well: the noun die Pein. It means something like torment, agony but it’s pretty rare nowadays and you rarely hear it in daily life. Except as a part of the German word for embarrassing: peinlich. Originally, it meant something like painfuland this is actually still kind of visible in the phrasing peinlich genau. Which is about being so precise, it hurts.

But the idea of embarrassing isn’t all that far either. Walking out of the bathroom into a crowded café with a six inch pee stain does kind of hurt. I mean… I think. I’ve never experienced it. Anyway, examples.

Es ist peinlich, wenn man im Restaurant nicht genug Geld dabei hat.

It’s embarrassingif you don’t have enough money with you at a restaurant.

Now, even though they’re overall pretty good translations for each other, there’s a couple of things we need to note. For one thing, at least to me peinlich is a little less grave than embarrassing. Like… a drunk prime minister urinating on the flag of his own country would be too big an embarrassment to be called peinlich. There, beschämend is probably the better translation.

But the more important difference has to do with the related words. We’ve already seen the origin of peinlich and the only relatives, Pein and the noun die Peinlichkeit,are pretty rare.Embarrassingon the other hand comes from the verb to embarrass, which is not rare at all, and neither is the form embarrassed. The origin of the verb is a combination of the prefix en- and a Latin word -barra which was about barring something, just in case you’re interested. Anyway, the thing that’s a bit tricky is that those rarely translate to something involving peinlich.

Now you’re probably like “Oh my God, so many options. How am I supposed to memorize that.” And you’re right to be worried because mixing those up is incredibly peinlich. Everybody will laugh. The good news is, though, that you can avoid it. All you have to do is to make sure you have a big pee stain on your pants. That’s an ancient technique called pisstraction, and it’s from the book the Art of Warhol by Macchiavelli.“Emanuel… does the fact that you’re talking nonsense mean that we’re done for the day? Because then we’d leave. We have stuff to do, you know.”Well, you got me there. We’re pretty much done :). Just to make sure though… of course it is NO problem if you don’t have the right translation for a given context. The ones I gave you weren’t even all there are. All that matters is that you remember that peinlichdoes NOT work as a translation for the entire embarrass-family, but only for embarrassing and cringy.

So, that’s it for today. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions or if you want to share a peinliche situation from your life in German, just leave me a comment. I hope you liked it and see you next time.

41

Leave a Reply

Subscribe

newestoldest

Notify of

berlingrabers

– Maria ist genervt, weil Thomas mal wieder Weltschmerz hat. – Maria is annoyed because once again Thomas “is suffering pain because of how the world is”. (Is there an idiomatic translation for it? Danke :))

Nope, “Weltschmerz” is one of those meme-popular German words with no concise or idiomatic English equivalent (see also: Schadenfreude, Fremdschämen).

I really don’t think “embarrassed/embarrassment” is necessarily more serious than “peinlich.” You might use it for more serious situations too, but if somebody told me, “I really embarrassed myself yesterday,” I wouldn’t assume they’d done something that was really all that big of a deal before I heard more. If you use “shame” and related terms, that would fit the escalation to “beschämend” and/or “Schande.”

I probably explained it a bit weird. What I meant is that “embarrassing” can go further toward seriousness than “peinlich”. So if you take the average level of serious for all uses of “peinlich” and “embarrassing” I think the latter will have a higher serious-factor… but on average. So it can go wherever “peinlich” can go, but “peinlich” can’t follow “embarrassing” everywhere. Gosh… I am expressing myself in such a complicated way today :D. Sorry for that!!

Reply

berlingrabers

That makes sense. :)

Reply

Jo Alex Sg

As always, your jokes make my day! I must confess, though, that I still don´t know when to use one or the other of the following verbs, as they both seem to lie in between the extremes, leaving me with the impression that only with time and exposure to the culture will one be able to tell apart the different situations in which to use them: bloßstellen – expose;embarrass sich blamieren – to embarrass oneself sich zum Affen machen – to make a fool of oneself

Anyway, thanks for one more delightful lesson! I do love your light-hearted way of teaching, it’s indeed a breath of fresh air!

The main one to remember is probably “(sich) blamieren”. “bloßstellen” is when you expose a secret about someone in front of some sort of audience. Like… a girlfriend says that her hubby isn’t a good kisser in front of her friends while he is also there. Does that help?

Reply

Jo Alex Sg

Oops, I sent the “Affen machen” too, disregard the last one, please, unless it also has some significant difference from the previous two.

I was thinking about “painfully exactly” first but then figured it’s unidiomatic/wrong. Does “painstakingly” include the notion of “exact”?

Reply

berlingrabers

“Painstaking” is very close to “sorgfältig”, I’d say. You “take pains” – i.e., make a real effort, despite any inconvenience. I’m not sure it’s a better or worse alternative, though it might be easier to remember because the sound is similar. It’s maybe a little more everyday-sounding than “meticulous,” too.

I might say she “weighs all the ingredients with excruciating precision” – not an idiom or anything, but it does get across the idea that she’s causing others pain. :)

Reply

Tonygwien

yes, “painstakingly” means with great care and thoroughness (with regard to every detail etc) …

Oh, I think that sounds way too proactive for what Maria is annoyed by. Thomas is wallowing in how bad the world is. In that state he has no energy on insisting on anything (except that the world is horrible) and he can’t even take on a clean shirt :)

Das geht nicht auf English. No one would ever say “You’re so cringe” in English, “You’re so embarrassing” is correct.

“Did you see how Thomas was flirt-dancing with the woman?” “Yeah, that was super embarrassing/super cringe.”

The same for here. We would only use “embarrassing” in this context. Though you could say that was cringe-worthy, or I cringed or he cringed at it. Cringe is an verb and denotes the action of: to shrink, bend, or crouch, especially in fear or servility; cower.

When I look in the dictionary the translation for to cringe is zusammenzuckend and other similars. What do you think?

I’m sure you’re right as far as standard English is concerned but I am going for a specific vernacular here. One that I mainly hear on Youtube. Young people (around 20) do use “cringe” as an adjective and German “peinlich” is a feasibly good match. Here’s a google search for the phrase “you’re so cringe”

There are 17.000 hits there and I’m sure I can find more for “that was cringe”, “It’s super cringe” and similar things. That doesn’t make it proper English of course, but it exists :). Would you agree? Aber trotzdem danke für die Korrektur :)

Reply

Amerikanerin

You’ve obviously not been hanging out with my sons – they use “cringe” as a substitute for embarrassing. Oddly enough, often in the same sentence as “Mom”. Hmmm… I think I might be on to something here.

Reply

Noah

The slight phonetic similarity between ‘peinlich’ and ‘pee stain’, in conjunction with that opening story, make for a great mnemonic which I’m certain will never allow me to forget the meaning of the word. Grim but effective. Also I can attest to the use of ‘cringe’ as an adjective in English; anyone unaware of this is likely over the age of thirty-five and should Google such things before leaving comments they deem to be corrective.

Nice post, I’m looking forward to reading more of this site!

P.S. Cheers to Emanuel and to the members who pitched in extra for a membership for lowly students like myself. My appreciation knows no bounds :D

All good, I don’t mind a false correction, it was genuine and with good intentions and I have done my fair share of ’em, too :). Thanks for backing me up though. I’m not a native speaker so I’m always left with a little bit of doubt.

Reply

Maksym

Great explaining, thank you! Also huge thanks and much love for the members who paid some extra for broke students:)

Hmmm… I’m not sure I would notice it as odd, so it’s absolutely not wrong. But it depends on the context. Could you give me an example of where you would use it?

Reply

Jeff H.

Hey Emanuel, I guess what I am saying is that I often use ‘Ich bin verlegen’ for ‘I’m embarrassed’ more than I say ‘Es ist mir peinlich’.

In the example I gave above – in English you often say when asked to do something in front of people – I’m too embarrassed (Ich bin zu verlegen) as opposed to saying ‘I’m too shy’ (Ich bin zu schüchtern.) It’s prob not correct and I probably overuse ‘verlegen.’ but here in Vienna I def sometimes hear verlegen being used for embarrassed. Cheers!